Take a Tour of the Factory and Call Me in the Morning

As many of you know, I’ve been asked to participate in LinkedIn’s Influential Business Leaders Forum as spokesperson for career management and recruiting passive candidates. This article is a version of one of my first posts on LinkedIn. It caused a big reaction among the recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers who read it.

Between the lines it describes one of my prime tenets of good recruiting: the critical need to control every step in the process and the conversation. This covers many dimensions including how candidates make career decisions, how hiring managers assess and recruit candidates, and how the hiring team makes their evaluation.

Whether you’re a third-party recruiter seeking more business or a corporate recruiter tired of having your best candidates misjudged, I think you’ll find the approach used in this true story useful on your next assignment.

Here’s how it goes.

Many, many years ago I was contacted by a business owner who had heard me speak at a business leader conference. The company had about 500 people and was producing household merchandise sold in the big box stores — Sears, Target, and Kmart. He was clearly desperate. He implored me to tell him the two questions I had said were all you needed to ask to fully assess competency for any position. He was looking for an operations VP, and being a full-time executive recruiter at the time, I told him I would be happy to reveal my secret assessment technique, but we needed to meet in person and discuss the actual job first. He continued to protest, demanding the questions on the spot. Sensing panic, I relented. Before proceeding though, I asked him what was so urgent that he needed the questions instantly. “The candidate is in the waiting room,” he quietly confessed.

After getting some sense of his business and the position he was trying to fill, I told him to follow the following instructions without compromise. Then call me right after meeting with the candidate.

First, do not meet the candidate in the office. Take the candidate for a tour of the manufacturing facility, instead.

As part of the tour, stop at each area that clearly demonstrates some of the biggest operational problems the person taking the VP job would have to address right away. These turned out to be poor factory layout, too much scrap, outdated process control measures, and excess raw material inventory.

After describing each problem for a few minutes, ask the candidate “if you were to get this job, how would you fix it?” Then have a 10-15 minute give-and-take discussion around his ideas. The purpose of this conversation is to understand how the candidate would figure out the problem and develop a reasonable solution. Based on this, evaluate the candidate on his problem-solving skills, the quality of the questions asked, and his general approach for implementing a solution.

When you’re done with this line of questioning, ask the candidate to describe something he has already accomplished that’s most comparable to the problem needing fixing. Spend another 10-15 minutes on getting specific details about this, including names, dates, metrics, type of equipment used, how vendors were managed, how labor problems were solved, who was on the team, how these people were managed, and the results achieved. Don’t be satisfied with superficial or general answers. I told him he must push to get actual details even if painful, and especially if he already thought the person was hireble.

Ask the same two questions and follow-up the same way for the other operational problems.

It should take at least 90 minutes to complete the tour. When done, tell the person you’re impressed with his background, and will get back to him in few days after seeing some other candidates. Then call me and we can discuss your reaction and figure out next steps.

The call came three hours later. The owner’s insight was profound. He said the candidate aced the problem-solving questions, but didn’t have any evidence of achieving comparable results. He told me the candidate was assertive, insightful, and clearly understood the problems that needed to be solved. However, the owner said the candidate’s answers to the comparable accomplishment questions were vague, shallow, and short.

He went on to say it was like talking to two different people. One was eloquent, animated, and confident talking about how he’d go about figuring out the problem and how he’d implement a solution. The other was like a fish out of water, hesitant and unsure, lacking details along with confidence. He concluded the candidate was probably a great consultant or staff person, but one who couldn’t be left in the factory alone. He wasn’t hands on, and wouldn’t relate to the people on the floor. This was pretty amazing when you consider he only had a 10-minute course in interviewing under his belt.

He then gave me the search assignment. We filled it in about a month. The person hired took the same tour, to the same spots, and answered the same questions. The difference though was our candidate could not only tell the owner how he’d figure out and solve the problems, but he had also accomplished something comparable. Also critical to this true story, the person hired was not from the same industry, had different academic credentials than listed in the job-description, and had less overall experience. More important, not only did he successfully eliminate the initial four problems once on-the-job, but another half-dozen or so, too.

Moral: If you know what you need done it only takes two questions to figure out if a candidate is competent and motivated to do it. If you don’t know what you need done, take a tour of the factory, and call me in the morning.

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About the Author

Lou Adler is the president of The Adler Group, a training and consulting firm helping companies find and hire top talent using Performance-based Hiring(sm). He is the Amazon best-seller author of Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 3rd Edition, 2007) and the new Nightingale-Conant audio program Talent Rules! Using Performance-based Hiring to Hire Top Talent (2007). Adler is a noted recruiting industry expert, national speaker, and columnist for a number of major recruiting Internet sites including SHRM, ERE.net, Kennedyinfo.com and ZoomInfo.com. Adler's early career included executive and financial management positions with The Allen Group and Rockwell International. He holds an MBA from UCLA and a B.S. in Engineering from Clarkson University, New York.

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Linkedin has become an awful business social networking site now that does not offer any value, and either charges you a lot for its “premium” services, or blocks you at every turn. I hate all the changes, so being an “influential” thought leader woth them means nothing to me.

Keith Halperin

Hey Lou,

Congrats on you new role writing for LI.
It’s good to see that those articles and comments where you praised [or at least mentioned (product-placement?] LinkedIn like:

Lou Adler | December 19th, 2011 | 5:30 am
Last year I worked with the remarkable LinkedIn Research Network on a major survey of professionals’ job-hunting status. (Exactly how and why are they “remarkable”? -kh)

and

The 20/20/60 Sourcing Plan
by Lou Adler
Sep 7, 2012, 12:17 am ET
This is shown in the pie chart summarizing the results of a survey we conducted with LinkedIn last year. (I hope you were paid for this survey. -kh)

helped out.

………….

I look forward to signing up for your: “How to Increase Your Income and Influence by Writing Recruiting-related Infomercials and Productorials”. It would be very valuable and useful to many of us….

@ Keith – Glad to see I’m not the only one that noticed…and not the only that is tired of having LinkedIn shoved down my throat!

Ty Chartwell

Lou,

I respect your work but:

-99% of corporate recruiters use Linkedin to pay, post, and wait
-99% of corporate recruiters use Linkedin to send IMs and wait
-The superstar recruiters use Linkedin to advertise they are hiring on their ‘updates’- wow
-Corporate recruiters shutting out search firms, so they can brilliantly to the above
-Growing number of external search firms now post on Linkedin – no value for client
Linkedin has become a tired old version of Career builder, HotJobs, Monster, and home to thousands of lazy recruiters.
-Linkedin now thinks ‘endorsements’ will make a difference.
Glad to see they have you being so influential.

Lou Adler

It’s clear from every comment here that most of you don’t now how to use LinkedIn Recruiter. So rather than criticize, why not think about what you don’t know. The value of LinkedIn is not posting, nor endorsements, nor the other hype. The value of LinkedIn Recruiter is the ability to search on your first degree connections’ connections and get warm, pre-qualified referrals. If you’re a corporate recruiter it also allows you to search on your co-workers’ connections and cherry-pick their connections. This allows you to build a pool of 4-5 hot prospects in less than 72 hours for any assignment. If you don’t understand the value of this concept, I suspect you’re not as strong a recruiter as you think you are. To find out take our next sneak peak of combining Performance-based Hiring with LinkedIn Recruiter and you’ll quickly see what it means to be a great recruiter. Or stick your head in the sand and not see what you’re missing. Your choice.

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